


Sammy

by Sir_Bedevere



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22960075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sir_Bedevere/pseuds/Sir_Bedevere
Summary: Rosie Palm taught Sam Vimes everything that he knew. Well, almost everything. Well – the everything that was to do with women. And although he’d argue that you could write what he knew about the fairer sex on the back of a small envelope, it was at least because of Rosie that he had anything to jot down at all.Some things are just not meant to be.
Relationships: Rosemary "Rosie" Palm/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	Sammy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a year or two again on Tumblr and always intended to put it on AO3, but apparently never got around to it.
> 
> So here it is.

Rosie Palm taught Sam Vimes everything that he knew. Well, almost everything. Well – the everything that was to do with women. And although he’d argue that you could write what he knew about the fairer sex on the back of a small envelope, it was at least because of Rosie that he had anything to jot down at all.

Not many boys who had grown up in the Shades could say the same thing, although Rosie would argue that not many boys from any walk of life had much claim to be men who knew the score either. When it came to men, Rosie Palm was much more of a take it or leave it kind of woman than her occupation would suggest.

Apart, of course, from Samuel Vimes. He was much more difficult to leave.

*

She’d always known Sammy. Rosie was three years older than him, and the older kids in the Shades always looked after the little ones, oldest to youngest and no questions asked. The mothers kicked them out onto the street at the arse end of the morning, and didn’t let them back into the house until they got back from work. It was better that way. Safer. Out on the street, you had all the other kids to watch you, and gods help anyone who tried messing with the little ones when the big ones were about. But it could be hard anyway. Rosie didn’t remember being a little one, although she supposed that she must have been once. She did remember fighting tooth and nail to protect the babies. They all did.

Sammy had been one of those little snotty brats. Skinny, like they all were, with knees so knobbly they were bigger than their heads. He was a fighter though, from the moment he toddled away from his Ma and took on the biggest kid he could find cos the boy dared to push another into the mud. Sammy got the shit beaten out of him, of course, but the important part was that he always got up again afterwards.

And wasn’t that just about the only thing you could say about Sam Vimes? He always got up again.

*

When he got old enough to run with the gangs and he didn’t need watching, Rosie turned her attentions to the younger kids, not that she was much of a kid herself anymore. But sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of Sam Vimes in the middle of some petty crime and she’d feel something in her chest that might have been the fact that he had grown into a handsome young man or might have been red hot fucking rage that he was wasting himself when he could have been so much better.

*

She was a seamstress long before he became a copper. The girls from the Shades always ended up working for their living long before the boys did.

The first time he caught her out after curfew, he refused to point his crossbow at her, and got a clip round the ear from his sergeant for the trouble.

*

Rosie would never forget the day she peeled John Keel up off the floor. The Watch in Ankh-Morpork weren’t much more than dogs for the Patrician, even the good ones, and they weren’t even well-fed hounds. But this man. He was proper. Like a lord or something, with broad shoulders and a sad face, but he had calluses on his hands and stubble on his chin like he was one of them.

It didn’t much matter in the end what he looked like, or where he was from.

John Keel ripped up the city, street by street, cobblestone by cobblestone, and things were never going to be the same again.

Rosie watched, like she always did. She saw the man fire up the people who had never stopped to think that they might have the strength to fight back, people who’d long given up on stuff ever being different. She saw him push back against the bullies who were throwing people in the mud and just for a second, a flicker of a moment, her mind flashed back to that skinny kid in the Shades.

*

He didn’t have many friends, especially after he started drinking, and she watched him pickle himself from the inside out, for days, months and then years, and sometimes she would pick him up off the street and make sure that he got home.

*

“I don’t know why you do this,” he said, one night, the night he had come to her door on his own accord. “I’m not worth it.”

“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him. He was always a bit desperate for this, in a way that should have been annoying but was sort of endearing. He was almost forty then, and he’d got better at it over the years, and she knew that was because of her.

That night, she undressed him and laid him on her bed, but he didn’t want that. She wasn’t even surprised really, when he started to cry.

Afterwards, they lay together under the blankets and he turned to look at her.

“Will you marry me, Rosie?”

She couldn’t even say that was a surprise either.

“I don’t think so, Sammy. We wouldn’t be any good for each other.”

He was quiet for a moment and then cleared his throat.

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”

*

The day he married for real, Lady Sybil Ramkin, Rosie got an invite as the head of a guild, of course. It was the social occasion of the year, after all. She was only a little bit disappointed that she didn’t get one as Sam’s friend.

But just before the ceremony started, when he was twitching at the front of the room and she was sat halfway back, he glanced over his shoulder and caught her eye, and he smiled.

Lady Sybil was radiant, so beautiful, and he was so in love with her, and Rosie clapped as hard as anyone when the deed was done and sealed with a kiss. 

She’d taught him how to do that.


End file.
